Comment by clickety_clack
2 days ago
As a long time European I never thought I’d come to see the sense of American ways, but having lived here now for a couple of years, it actually is easier for it to just be straight up 8.5 x 11 rather that a ratio that includes a square root.
It's an interesting tiny trade-off.
Everyone makes paper the same hypothetical way, by producing large sheets and cutting them in half, and ANSI E (34"x44" or 864mm x 1118mm) isn't that different than A0 (841mm x 1189mm), but the slight starting difference means that there are two aspect ratios for ANSI (17/22 and 11/17). On the one hand, they're simple fractions and not irrational numbers; on the other, they're different, so you can't just double the size of something printed on ANSI A/letter sized to fill ANSI B/tabloid size, the way you can go from A4 to A3.
Only a small subset of users will ever want to do that (since if you're printing text you probably need to re-typeset it to keep the type a good size for reading), but only a small subset of users actually care about the aspect ratio or exact dimensions of their paper at all, so whether it is 8.5 or 8.11 or 8.314159... inches doesn't really matter.
Many, many people want to double or halve documents.
Teachers at school would print (or photocopy) A4 in half to save paper, or doubled for the blind girl in my class.
I'd do it myself at university to save paper (money).
I don't print much nowadays, but I use this feature occasionally to print something as a booklet. I printed some lost board game rules on A3, since it was an A4 PDF.
Sorry, I should have specified "and have it look perfect".
People do that all the time with US letter paper, print two to a sheet, you just end up with slightly wonky margins and usually everything being more like 40-45% the size it would be doubling up A4 paper. That use case isn't really hindered.
You are wildly wrong in your assumption that the folding property has low value.
Every printed document, almost without exception, is printed on larger sheets which are later folded and cut.
Being able to do this precisely saves a vast amount of waste and time.
That's not a difference between ANSI and ISO paper sizes.
ANSI A (US letter) is a half sheet of ANSI B (ledger/tabloid) is a half sheet of C is a half sheet of D is a half sheet of E. When producing the paper, there is no waste of material or time, its the same process just starting with a slightly differently sized starting sheet (hypothetically; I am assuming that paper production has advanced beyond shaking screens of the largest handleable size by hand).
The difference is that ANSI A, C and E have aspect ratios of 17/22 (0.77) and ANSI B & D have aspect ratios of 11/17 (0.65), while all ISO sizes have aspect ratios of 1/sqrt(2) (0.71).
The waste comes in when scaling between adjacent sizes.
Going from A4 to A3, you can enlarge a document to 141% of the original size, and the margins will match.
Going from US letter to tabloid (ANSI A to B), the width of the paper is 129% larger and the height is 154% larger, so you can only enlarge your document to 129% the original size, and you have larger vertical margins, which is waste.
(But if you double it, from A to C, the problem goes away, because the aspect ratio is the same; so you can produce posters of multiple sizes, just not on every ANSI paper size at once.)
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So, regarding books, why do you think the methods of printing books varies based on the size of the printing sheets?
Regardless of the size of your printing sheet, you choose a page size that's based on dividing your printing sheet in half N number of times, typeset your document to that page size (which you can't even skip for ISO paper sizes, because you pick your font size independent of the paper sizes), print 2^N pages per printing sheet in a particular pattern, fold and/or cut the sheet up, and bind.
There's no difference in waste or time regardless of your paper size choices, unless you do something silly or artistic, like choosing to print a square book or some shape not derived from halving your paper size.
I've been working with paper sizes a lot for the last year, and I've rarely thought about the square root of two ratio and when I've, it has been just to amuse myself. However, knowing that to get an A5 piece of paper I just need to cut/fold in half an A4, and that I can get to A3 and A2 by adding A4s, has been really useful. If I were in USA, didn't have that, and instead would have to install yet another new size system in my head[^1], I would despair.
[^1]: This is fun! https://papersizes.io/us/
What bothers me mostly about American papersizes (I’m also a European immigrant) is that the ratio is not consistent between sizes. So if I design a poster, but want a couple of letter sized printouts for some reason, I have to create a whole new design, rather then just shrink everything down. Otherwise the margins get all wonky.
One nice thing with Letter size is you can fit 80 columns of 10 dpi text with standard LaserJet margins. With A4 you have to squeeze the characters together slightly to make that fit.